To Edit is to Write: Variations of Text and Scale in Carlos Ríos’s Oficina Perambulante

Since 2016, Argentinian writer Carlos Ríos has been running Oficina Perambulante, an artisanal publishing house in the “repentista” tradition that features both established authors of world literature and new Latin American writers. The project is characterised by its cardboard-based publications, work with texts in varied formats, and use of editorial procedures linked to questions of material form. Oficina Perambulante initially published 10 x 7 cm books, made only from what could be laid out on a double-sided A4 page. Since 2020, this uniformity of format has been broken, and the editions vary in their material composition, but the house has maintained its original principles of craftsmanship and recycling. In her talk, Verónica Stedile Luna (National University of La Plata/ ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry) considers Ríos’s publishing practices alongside his trajectory as a writer to examine how procedures of publisher intervention—text selection, title changes, composition from fragments, choice of cover materials and images—also function as modalities of writing.